Jazz Music History explored by instrument and musician.

Saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, drums, guitar, vocals: Jazz music history created by truly great musicians who played something new and beautiful on each of these. Do you want to find gorgeous trumpet playing? You can find out about it here. Do you want to hear why every sax player after Charlie Parker played differently? You can find out why here.

My name is TJ and I am from New Orleans where jazz was born. I love listening to and sometimes playing jazz. Below is a photo of me playing sax in a jazz club here several years ago:

But this site is not about me. It is about some of the wonderful giants of jazz who played sounds man had never heard before. Magic moments when every player heard every other player and heard the whole at the same time. Spontaneous, cooperative creation of beauty and transcendent awareness of the present moment.

This site will not try to be Wikipedia nor an exhaustive encyclopedia of jazz. It will include what I believe are the seminal greats of jazz music history on the most important jazz instruments and some of the other major players who are among my favorites. I confess a bias toward interesting chord changes, beautiful melodies and harmonies and hard bop.

There is a progression in jazz music history of playing on each instrument. If you love the guitar, you will love hearing the progression from Django Rheinhart to Charley Christian to
Wes Montgomery to... Or the sax progression from Coleman Hawkins to Lester Young to....

There is also a progression in the styles of jazz with the passage of time. You can find some of the great examples of Traditional Jazz [Dixieland], Swing, Big Band, Bop, West Coast, Hard Bop, etc.

Please enjoy the pages about different artists, instruments and styles and make suggestions for future pages. Please come back to see the pages I will add and give me your feedback. Feel free to take part in the polls of players and everything else you find here